The subject is telemetry, but the article calls it "tracking code". I would be curious to know if the writer actually knows that the telemetry data is enough to track users, or whether they're just exploiting the recent FUD about telemetry.
Edit: To clarify, "tracking" means that you're following a particular user around. "Some user pressed the Audacity record button at 13:04:42 Sunday" is not tracking data (although with sufficiently granular data you could do fingerprinting (which is tracking), the countermeasures for which should be obvious) - "User #1934602 pressed the Audacity record button at 13:04:42 Sunday" is tracking, even if it's anonymized.
There are different levels of privacy that people care about (e.g. some people are ok with anonymized tracking, while others don't want tracking at all). Conflating them is an underhanded tactic used by people to emotionally manipulate others. Furthermore, "non-tracking statistics" is a category of things that few people care about, versus "anonymous tracking", so conflating these two is particularly egregious.
Edit: To clarify, "tracking" means that you're following a particular user around. "Some user pressed the Audacity record button at 13:04:42 Sunday" is not tracking data (although with sufficiently granular data you could do fingerprinting (which is tracking), the countermeasures for which should be obvious) - "User #1934602 pressed the Audacity record button at 13:04:42 Sunday" is tracking, even if it's anonymized.
There are different levels of privacy that people care about (e.g. some people are ok with anonymized tracking, while others don't want tracking at all). Conflating them is an underhanded tactic used by people to emotionally manipulate others. Furthermore, "non-tracking statistics" is a category of things that few people care about, versus "anonymous tracking", so conflating these two is particularly egregious.